Goals & The Beast

First off, I apologize for such a delay since my last post. I have been heavily focused on finishing up my Film Production Degree from SLCC, which I was able to do in December of 2013! Woo hoo!

Despite having Meniere's Disease, I was able to accomplish yet another goal, and it makes me all the more vigilant in beating this illness. With guidance and support from my amazing professors, I was able to write several screenplays, shoot, direct and edit two short films and several commercials, and, above all, fully realize that filmmaking and storytelling is where my passion lies.

My next goal is a lofty one, but one that I hope brings about awareness and funding for research for a cure for this bloody illness. I will post updates to this project as I go along, but for now, I want to bask in the glow of having beaten the beast, at least long enough for me to finish a lofty goal.

xo

Shepherd

Last year, I wrote and directed a pretty decent short film called Shepherd. It's a simple story set around lost memory and found second chances. When it was finished, I had glorious plans to enter it into film festivals across the country. But, per usual, my inhibitions kept me from putting it out into the universe. I was then quite surprised to find out this week that Shepherd is screening at a special Filmed in Utah event tomorrow night at the Salt Lake City Public Library. Amazing.

Apparently, the universe gave up on waiting for me, and found the movie on its own. At least, that's what I choose to believe. :)

So, if you're free, the screening starts at 7pm. Now I just have to keep from breaking out in hives from anxiety until then.

Serc

Serc, or betahistine dihydrochloride, is a special medicine developed to treat disorders of the inner ear. For some reason, Serc, is readily available in other countries, and is quite often prescribed in Europe and Canada for Meniere's Disease, but not so readily available in the US. Serc works by improving the blood flow to the inner ear, and also works on normalizing the way in which inner ear nerve endings respond to outside influences. 

My doctor let me try Serc for a time. I was surprised to learn that I had to have it formulated at a compounding pharmacy. In the US, a compounding pharmacy has the ingredients and capabilities to compound certain drugs and medicines that either aren't mass produced in the US, or need to be tailored for a certain patient. I was lucky to find a compounding pharmacy near me that could compound my betahistine. I was unlucky to learn that compounding can be, and was for me, very expensive. I think I stopped taking Serc because of the high cost. I'm not sure if I even gave it a fair shot of helping me or not.

In my continued effort to improve my health, I'm going to give Serc another shot. I will start tomorrow, and report my progress here. Fingers crossed.

Onward we go, fellow soldiers.

The Documentary

I'm very excited about this post. For almost a year, I've been in production on a documentary about Meniere's Disease. I've been fortunate enough to have the support and participation of Meniere's Disease sufferers around the world. My team and I are currently putting together applications for grants, building out our Kickstarter page, and have almost finalized the trailer. The goal of this film to is raise awareness about Meniere's Disease in order to further funding for research. As I mentioned in a past post, Meniere's Disease hasn't had much of a voice, but I'm happy to utilize my film education and training to give all of us a voice at long last.

I will continue to post updates to this project here. If you would like to participate or support this film in any way, please email me. Thanks friends.

skyecemerson@gmail.com

Less Movies, More Meniere's

Less Movies, More Meniere's

Film school is officially finished, and now my focus turns back to Meniere's Disease advocacy. I will still utilize this site to post about films, but I've been neglecting my Meniere's Disease updates, so here is what's happening with Meniere's Disease and me:

The negatives: What the what? Hearing in my left ear continues to decline. Boo. My audiologist recommended a hearing aid. So, me being me, I had to get the mack daddy of hearing aids. It's a tiny little thing, barely noticeable. The cool thing is that it works just like a Bluetooth. I can program my IPhone to ring directly to it, and it will also play my Itunes. This could be very beneficial in boring work meetings. Only kidding. Sort of.

Now, if only I can start remembering to wear it more often. I'm pretty terrible at this. I blame the Meniere's Disease brain fog.

The vertigo and dizziness have been hit and miss. I was very hopeful that the VNS surgery would have completely quelled these spells. Alas, the vertigo has found a way to break through on occasion. I'm now considering an alternative therapy that, if I do undertake, I will discuss further here in a month or two.

The positives: I continue to work, live and play. I am happy. I am functioning. I refuse to let this illness ruin my life. I have great family and friends and loved ones who support me and help me when needed. I am never going to give up fighting this illness. I continue to travel and enjoy life its fullest, and if Meniere's Disease thinks it will take that away from me, it has another thing coming.

Road To Perdition

Sam Mendes is a favorite of mine, stemming from his work on my favorite film, American Beauty. This movie was my inspiration into filmmaking, due in large part to Alan Ball’s adept storytelling style and Mendes’ beautiful depiction of emotional frailty and violence. He carries this style into Road To Perdition, focusing heavily on the emotional impact of the story by using imagery to do the talking, keeping dialogue to a minimum.

Mendes is a storyteller in themes. In American Beauty, Mendes creates beauty in simple, mundane objects, such as a plastic shopping bag, which is used to help the audience realize that there “is so much beauty in the world…” that we fail to notice. In Road To Perdition, he creates beauty by setting the lighting and coloring in such a way that you feel as though you’ve stumbled into a great painting, versus a crime film. This film actually lacks standard coloring, instead focused on shades of brown, with hints of greens and blacks mixed in.

Mendes uses water as a constant theme in most of his movies. Water equals death. However, a key fact to note is that water is always flowing and changing and moving, and cannot be restrained. My guess is that Mendes was also attempting to state something to the effect of “fate cannot be controlled or managed. It is a benevolent force. No matter how hard we try to pull fate into the direction we want it, it will take the course that it determines, just as water does.” I think in this film, while water represents death, it can also represent fate.

The word Perdition is also a theme. Perdition has been used as a term for hell, and Sullivan Sr. is stuck in contradiction-he is literally leading his son to the city of hell, but also wants to protect him from it.

The cinematography in this film is some of the best you will see as a moviegoer. Atmospheric is the way that I would describe the lighting. This movie is filled with soft shadows that often fall off into nothingness. However, the scene with the boy standing on the beach is my favorite-the brightness of the sky meshes with the water and the beach in a way that reminded me of what heaven must be like…utter brightness. This then melds into white snow and a bike riding through it. Lighting for bright scenes, such as snow, is no easy task. To be able to create such a beautiful scene, taking the audience from standing at the edge of the water with this boy, not in an overly colored or saturated scene, but rather in starkness, then transform into snow, is nothing short of skilled brilliance.  

Man With A Movie Camera

This film was a complete, head to toe lesson in cinematography, not only how to visually make a film, but how to visually look at the world around you. The first thing I noticed and the last thing that stuck with me were the beautiful frames of each scene. Vertov does not simply show a building perfectly framed in the center of the lens. Instead, we see rows and rows of windows rising above from a low angled shot. Or we see strong, steel, straight beams of the top of a building cut through the frame as another lower building below is just inside the lower thirds of the frame. I'm assuming that Vertov had very little to no time to set up each shot, which speaks to his brilliant, artistic, cinematic mind. I found myself realizing that while he is aiming to paint a true to life portrait of a single day in Russia, his work actually showing us how we SHOULD look at the world, not how we DO look at the world. Even though it flew by with a flash, my favorite shot was of a trolley car sliding vertically along the same axis of the camera, while another trolley car crisscrossed horizontally in front of the frame. Seeing the two trolleys flow against each other in such a way was absolutely beautiful. It's a way that I wouldn't have looked at them, but it showed me what I'm missing by not stepping into another vantage point.

I don't believe that Vertov's goal was to depict what daily life looks like, I think rather he was showing us how daily life is depicted through the lens of a camera, when we step outside our minds' eye to look at life from another perspective. We as humans do not often crouch low to look at train wheels speeding by. We don't often peer out over the city we live in, looking at the shadows cast by a low hanging tree. We don't often catch the beauty of following a reflection in glass versus staring at the subject itself. But we should.

Showing the eyeball in the lens, showing the camera sliding into the frame, is a great representation of  an ever-present eye. He calls it the "truth-eye." However, this film helped me realize that cameras don't always capture what we see. They don't always record what we witness. Instead, if the person behind the camera is aware enough, cameras capture events in life from the angles in which we wished we could have seen them.